Physical description

Christmas Books.
Author: Charles Dickens.
Publisher: Chapman & Hall Ltd, London.
Date: 1894. (See note section this document for more information on Edition).
Green cloth hardcover with Authors name to front cover in gold. Spine has gold title lettering. The spine has a Library label.

Publication type

fiction

Inscriptions & markings

The label on spine cover with typed text PAT 823 DIC
Paste down front end paper has sticker from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute.
Front fly cover has Title and Publisher Details.

Summary

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was one of the great English novelists of the Victorian era, famous for vivid characters, social criticism, and stories that were first published in serial form. He began as a journalist, rose to enormous popularity during his lifetime, and wrote major works such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.
This volume gathers five separate Christmas stories rather than one continuous novel. The best known of them, “A Christmas Carol”, follows Ebenezer Scrooge’s moral transformation after visits from supernatural spirits, while the others mix ghostly, sentimental, and domestic themes around Christmas, memory, family, and social feeling. Together they show Dickens using Christmas as a setting for moral instruction, sympathy for the poor, and festive storytelling.
This Nelson and Sons London Christmas Books volume is a collected edition of Dickens’s five Christmas novellas, “A Christmas Carol,” “The Chimes”, “The Cricket on the Hearth”, “The Battle of Life”, and “The Haunted Man”. It is not the original 1840's publication; the Nelson publication is a later reprint in the company’s “Nelson’s Classics series, with examples catalogued from 1941 to 1959.